A Qualitative Exploration of the Views of Entrepreneurship Educators in Assessing Educational Impact on Potential Graduate Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship is a key component of a growing economy and graduate entrepreneurs are seen as valuable contributors to these economic goals. To facilitate this, entrepreneurship education is widespread at universities encompassing both on-curricular courses and extracurricular activities. However, there is not a uniform approach to entrepreneurship education with different topics, different objectives, and different metrics for success, taught by educators from vastly different backgrounds. An entrepreneurship course could conceivably have an objective of knowledge acquisition, upskilling, changing mindset, increasing entrepreneurial intention, or simply the awareness of entrepreneurship as a career. There are also a variety of metrics that are used to measure the success of entrepreneurship education interventions from venture creation to entrepreneurial intention and self-efficacy. This paper attempts to understand the views of current educators and suggests what can be done to improve from an understanding what is effective. To this end, entrepreneurship educators working at UK universities were interviewed consisting of research focussed lecturers, teaching focussed lecturers, senior managers, support staff, and incubator managers. The findings suggest that there are a wide variety of backgrounds for entrepreneurship educators, with very few from an academic business strategy background as others have found, but from sciences, economics, as well as a small number from business areas such as marketing. They have transitioned into entrepreneurship through a variety of means e.g. an interest in sustainability, or from an experience of science spin-outs and a surprising number had family members who were entrepreneurs. Many have come from a practical background and use this as part of their educational offering. Educators generally believed in experiential learning rather than theory, and mostly suggested they wanted to give students skills that can be applied during the course and afterwards, although most also included teaching some theoretical models. Staff showed evidence of tuning their offerings to their audience with case studies or live company projects where appropriate, with early years courses often focused on raising awareness of entrepreneurship as a career, whilst later years build skills for starting a venture or encourage venture creation itself. We conclude by understanding the motivations that entrepreneurship educators have for undertaking entrepreneurship education, discussing how these differing backgrounds can be utilised effectively and what part of the background, and suggest what activities and approaches they take are most effective in helping entrepreneurship educators enable successful student entrepreneurship.